


The Lovecraftian Horror of Lover's Lane

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angel and Demon True Forms (Good Omens), Crack, M/M, POV Outsider, Sort Of, weird mix of light horror and comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:33:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24898486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Sometimes, older couples come to Lover's Lane.  Sometimes,very mucholder couples come to Lover's Lane.  Sometimes, they get carried away.  Sometimes, the cops get an eyeful.  An eyeful of what, they're never going to be entirely sure . . .
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 94
Kudos: 331





	The Lovecraftian Horror of Lover's Lane

PC Lang didn’t think that there was much point in patrolling the various Lover’s Lanes around town. If teenagers were screwing in cars, they weren’t getting in fights or hitting things with bats. It was, ultimately, fairly harmless.

But the job was the job, so she walked alongside PC Harris, torch in hand, knocking on the windows of the various cars and telling embarrassed teens (and a few embarrassed older people) to kindly knock it off before she had to officially take notice. They had startled a sixty-year-old married couple the other night. Lang couldn’t comprehend the notion of coming here, and doing it in the back seat of a car, when you had a perfectly acceptable  _ bed— _ but, who knew, maybe it was a nostalgia thing.

Harris thought the whole thing was funny. But then, Harris was the sort of person who resented any attempt to make him take life seriously.

Lang was about to shine the light in the window of a Mini—how did anyone have  _ room _ to screw in a Mini?—when she noticed a different light coming from the far end of the parking area.

It was—ghostly. That was the only description she could think of. Pale, moonlight-esque, but not moonlight because it was definitely centered on a big car—

No, not just moonlight. There was a flash of flame in it. Lang jumped, momentarily thinking that the car had actually  _ caught fire _ somehow, and that this was about to turn into a giant screaming emergency, but then the fiery glow dissipated.

“The fuck?” Harris opined.

“Got me. Playing with glow sticks or something?” The light was far too bright for glow sticks.

Lang moved forward warily, conscious of the weight of the nightstick at her hip. Police didn’t like surprises, it was in the job description. And the glow—multicolored, now, spilling out of the windows of the car—definitely qualified as a surprise. Or people playing silly buggers—cops didn’t like people playing silly buggers either.

What could  _ cause _ something like that? Had they rigged up some sort of lighting system inside their car? Lang would actually have to check to figure out if that was illegal. Certainly running it while the car was in motion would be a traffic hazard, but running it while parked—

“Jesus Christ,” Harris said conversationally.

“What’s going on?”

_ “I know that car.” _

The car was certainly distinctive. A classic of some sort. Belonged in a museum. “Whose is it, then?”

“It isn’t,” Harris said, “exactly. I mean, nobody knows. Damn thing’s a cryptid.”

“A what?”

“Like Bigfoot or the chupacabra. It’s the One That Got Away. Impossible to ticket. Impossible to chase down. Some people figure it’s a ghost.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Lang asked. The light from the car’s windows was making her wonder, a little bit.

“My nan’s best friend said that she had a ghostly old woman in her house who rearranged her mugs every night. Nan always figured she was doing it herself. She’d gone balmy long ago, nan said.”

“Yeah.” Lang didn’t believe in ghosts. Very definitely not. “Well, let’s find out what Bigfoot looks like—”

She looked in the windows.

It was a mistake to look in the windows.

Whatever was in there—Lang didn’t know how to make sense of it. It involved eyes, she was certain of that. Eyes, feathers, scales, and little rivulets of fire. But eyes were supposed to belong to something, they belonged stuck in someone or something’s face, and these eyes seemed to fizz in and out of existence like foam. The same with the feathers, and the sliding scaly parts that looked like an iridescent snake’s flanks. If there was a form somewhere in the confusion, Lang couldn’t make it out. She remembered some sort of documentary about physics, about how stuff was really popping in and out of reality all the time, it was just that it was so very small that nobody could see it doing it. This, whatever it was, was not small.

That wasn’t even the most disturbing part. The most disturbing part was the surge of feeling—of sensation, almost, it was so strong. Yearning. Passion. Need. Fulfillment. It raised an answering, and very unwelcome, yearning in Lang’s own body, and she was suddenly terrified that she was going to seize Harris and try to rip his clothes off—suddenly terrified that clothes wouldn’t be enough, and she’d try to rip off his skin.  _ Intimacy, _ intimacy beyond intimacy, that was what the feeling was—

Lang dropped her torch and staggered backwards. “What the hell. What the  _ hell. What the hell?” _

Harris wasn’t any more coherent. “Fuck! Fucking fuck! Fucking fucker fucking  _ what.” _

That was when they both heard the Voice.

It was a very polite Voice. Very cultured. The fact that it was also a chorus of voices that cut into a person like broken glass—that didn’t diminish the politeness. It was just the sort of politeness that had a threat crouched inside it, a flavor of  _ remove yourself or be removed. _

It said,  _ “Sir and madam, if you wouldn’t mind leaving at this juncture? We are  _ very much _ otherwise occupied.” _

Lang bolted.

She only realized that Harris had bolted in the same direction when she stopped running, maybe two minutes later, on the other side of the park from Lover’s Lane, putting her hands on her knees and gasping for breath.

Lang stood there for a moment and listened to her pounding heart. She had encountered something—well, it wasn’t normal, she was sure of that. Possibly not of this world.

“You okay?” she said to Harris finally.

The answer was slow in coming. “You ever read Stephen King?”

Lang shook her head. “Only so long I can stand to read Americans witter on about living in Maine before the action starts.”

“Fair,” Harris admitted. “It’s just—he wrote a thing about a car, once.”

“Where it tries to kill people, right? Think I may have seen a movie.”

“Yeah. Well, no. This isn’t that one, this is about a car which sort of isn’t. I don’t think that was a car. I think it was something that  _ looks _ like a car because we don’t have the wossname to process whatever it really was.”

Lang thought about it. “For camouflage?” she hazarded. It wasn’t a nice thought.

“Not sure it would need any. You heard that—whatever it was.”

That voice, Lang thought. There had been  _ power _ in that voice. Power of a sort she had never encountered, power she never wanted to encounter again. “So there’s a not-car something sitting back there, doing God knows what—what the hell are  _ we _ supposed to do about it?”

“Not look in the  _ fucking _ windows,” Harris said.

Lang wondered if there was a way to ask if Harris had felt the same surge of frightening intimacy that she had, and glanced reflexively down at his trousers. There wasn’t a tent there, but Harris shifted as if to cover one up. So—probably, Lang decided. It was something she was never, ever going to ask. “What happens if someone else looks in the fucking windows?”

Harris shuddered faintly. “Kind of get the impression someone could hurt themselves.”

“Yeah,” Lang said, “I felt—yeah.” Not going to talk about it. “So, you’re saying—we go back, then? Keep idiot teenagers from getting themselves—whatever?”

“Getting themselves et,” Harris said, “if it’s anything like a Stephen King story. I don’t—I don’t think we should get too near it.”

“Yeah, no, definitely not.”

It might have been more dramatic, when they crept back to Lover’s Lane, if the car-that-wasn’t-a-car had been gone without a trace. But it was still sitting there, glowing from the windows.

It was, all in all, about an hour before it drove away, still glowing faintly. Lang and Harris chased off three teenagers in that time. Exactly what the odd one out was doing at Lover’s Lane alone, they would never know.

“We’re not going to follow it,” Lang observed, noting that neither of them was making a move to follow it.

“It’s loose in London.” Harris was looking after the car, a haunted expression on his face. “Doing God knows what.” He took a deep breath. “Probably a good thing nobody can catch it to give it a ticket.”

“Yeah,” Lang echoed. “Probably a good thing.”

“Are we going to do anything about this? Report it?”

“How? We’d get sectioned.”

“Yeah.”

“So we just—do nothing.”

“Can’t think of anything else we can do,” Harris said. “That was the point of that Stephen King book. Some things, you just can’t explain.”

§

_ Angel. _

_ Yes, dear? _

_ How am I supposed to drive in the dark with you glowing like that? _

_ You have only yourself to blame. Or congratulate. I’m more inclined towards congratulation, myself. _

_ You don’t think a  _ literal _ afterglow is maybe a bit cliche? _

_ So is an assignation in the back seat of a car, but what can I say? The Temptation proved too much for me. And, my dear? _

_ Yes? _

_ I’ve never been happier about it. You were magnificent. _

_ Ngk. You are trying to discorporate me. You are honestly, seriously trying to discorporate me here. _

_ Oh, should I use another word? Because I have a great many at my disposal. Wonderful, incredible, gentle . . . you know, pulling over is not going to help with the afterglow problem. If you’re after what I think you’re after. _

_ I  _ really _ don’t care. _


End file.
